An anecdote aside in re: vivre et penser comme des cochons. A friend of mine is the IT head of a big international law firm; he’s based in Paris, but recently returned from the main offices in LA and announced his quest for cochons - pins or other cute snouty pig tchochkies. These are to be distributed to the computer geek employees of the law firm who merit recognition. The Big Boss had asked my friend to identify the cochons in the office, who are to be decorated with pigs or pig parts, like medals of the Legion d‘Honneur. It isn’t an insult: au contraire. You see it has something to do with the American work ethic as expressed by the ham and egg breakfast. « The chicken was involved; the pig was committed. »
This too - the rewards for, the pride in, living and thinking with porcine commitment - has something to do with Contemporary Art.
So Fort Kant’s meme concerns fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art offered by Alain Badiou. We glean from a casual glance over them that they are intended to apply only to what is euphemistically called ’the Art World’s’ cochons. Indeed one of their evident purposes is - as is typical of theses on art - the winnowing of the art market’s present stock, the identification of the chickens in hog’s clothing and the expulsion of their value-disruption. The chosen exemplar of Badiou’s art object is one of the conspiracy drawings of Mark Lombardi, (certified cochon).
Another aside: Mad Magazine was it? Or National Lampoon? - when I was a tot, I saw in one of these publications a cartoon of Martin Luther, but instead of 99 Theses nailed to the church door, it was 99 feces. 99 large oozy turds affixed by fat nails to a great oaken door.
Badiou introduces his fifteen theses in a way that hints we may be dealing with items available for similar (mis)interpretation:
« I think the great question about contemporary art is how not to be Romantic. It's the great question and a very difficult one. More precisely, the question is how not to be a formalist-Romantic. Something like a mixture between Romanticism and formalism. On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms. But, on the other side, is obsession with the body, with finitude, sex, cruelty, death. The contradiction of the tension between the obsession of new forms and the obsession of finitude, body, cruelty, suffering and death is something like a synthesis between formalism and Romanticism and it is the dominant current in contemporary art. All the 15 theses have as a sort of goal, the question how not to be formalist-Romantic. That is, in my opinion, the question of contemporary art. »
I have to admit off the bat I can’t imagine what the hell he is talking about here. He can’t really be announcing, now, his discovery that there really aren’t Muses and geisty inspirations? It seems the purpose of this comment is to hawk up a globule of phlegm to launch Bourdieuward. But at least its clear that the gesture is prescriptive. Or predictive really, prognosticating in that slightly walocky WSJ way which intends to influence, if not precisely openly construct, the manifestation of the objects of a prophetic practise grounded in the purported acute observation and analysis of the eggy present. A memo basically to appraisers, investors and aspiring producers, sketching out projections for the next decade.
And this immediately places Badiou in the corps of clerks labouring away at the maintenance of the Art Market, which is fuelled constantly, and desperately, by the seemingly gratuitous issue of such prescriptions, Art is This, Art is That. It IS this, really, if hiddenly, and ought then be rendered more obviously itself (but not too obviously. It mustn‘t become out and out criticism). The predicates are of no consequence whatsoever. Art is a rose is an onion will serve. What matters is the compulsive, droning intonation - Art Is - in the face of what to the ideal naiveté of the fabulous child confronted with the bare arse of authority would be simultaneously puzzlingly obvious and uneasily suggestive in its surface insignificance: simply, that Art Isn‘t. Not really, anyway. Not in any fashion worth discussing. Because it isn’t, there is a case of indecent exposure to be addressed.
So the first three words of the proposed theses of Badiou
Art is not
could have been a good start. But then, something goes terribly wrong. In the usual way.
I have finally gotten hold of the real professional English translation of Bourdieu’s Les Règles de l’art, The Rules of Art:
The dialectic of distinction
From the reading of some of the books of that era [turn of the 20th c.] or immediately afterward, and their detailed accounts of all the literary schools, it is difficult not to draw an impression that we are dealing with a universe which is subject, in an almost mechanical fashion, to the law of action and reaction -- or if one wants to include intentions and dispositions, of pretension and distinction. There is no action by an agent that is not a reaction to all the others, or to one or another among them; neo-Romanticism rejects Symbolist obscurity and tries to reconcile poetry and science; Moréas’ ‘Roman’ school opposes Symbolism by returning to classicism; Fernand Gregh’s ‘humanism’ rejects Symbolism as obscure and inhumane; Morice’s ‘neo-classical renaissance’ is opposed wholesale to everything that is new and so forth.It is understandable how one could place at the turn of the century, as Robert Wohl does, the emergence of a very marked tendency to think of the whole social order in terms of a scheme of division into generations (following the logic which often makes intellectuals extend to the whole social world the characteristics of their own microcosm): it is in effect the moment when this division tends to generalize itself to the whole field of cultural production. This occurs especially in the with the revolt declared in the books by Agathon (the pseudonym of Henri Massis, born in 1886, and Alfred de Tarde, born in 1880), L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (1911), and Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui (1913), against the scientistic thought of the Renans and Taines which had dominated the whole intellectual field in the 1880s and which conquers the university field through the founders of the new sciences and the new university, such as Durkheim, Siegnobos, Aulard, Lavisse, Lanson and Brunot. In is critical phase of a permanent struggle that transposes the opposition between right and left, between Catholics and atheists, to the core of the intellectual field, the fundamental divisions that will becomes the structuring principles of later visions of the world are asserted in all their clarity: the rejection of reason or intelligence in the name of the heart or of faith leads to an anti-rationalism or an irrationalism that valorises comprehension over explanation, rejects science and especially social science -- and most especially ‘teutonic’ sociology -- for its reductionism, positivism, and materialism, exalts ‘culture’ against the soulless erudition of the ‘intellectual technicians’ and their file cards and aims to restore the national ideal - that is to say, the classical humanities, Latin and Greek, the pantheon of French authors and also, on another plane, sports and virile virtues.
The opposition between the incumbents and the pretenders installs at the very core of the field a tension between those who try to overtake their rivals and those who wish to avoid being overtaken; as if it were a race. This happens with Zola and Maupassant when they respond to the success of the psychological novel by changing their theme and style, with La Rêve and Une Vie, as if to realize by anticipation the project of their competitors: ‘Besides if I had the time, I would myself do what they want to do,’ Zola replied to Huret’s survey, meaning that he himself would effect that outmoding of naturalism, that is to say, of himself, that his adversaries were trying to effect against him.
Specific revolutions and external changes
If the permanent struggles between possessors of specific capital and those who are still deprived of it constitute the motor of an incessant transformation of the supply of specific products, it remains true that they can only lead to deep transformations of the symbolic relations of force that result in the overthrowing of the hierarchy of genres, schools and authors when these struggles can draw support from external changes moving in the same direction. Among these changes; the most determining is no doubt the growth (linked to economic expansion) of the educated populations (at all levels of the school system) that underlies two parallel processes: the rise in the number of producers who live by their pen or draw subsistence from the small jobs offered by cultural enterprises (publishing houses, papers, etc.); and the expansion of the market of potential readers who are thus offered to successive pretenders (Romantics, Parnassians, naturalists, Symbolists, etc.) and their products. These two processes are obviously linked to each other to the extent that it is the growth of the market of potential readers that, in allowing the development of the press and the novel, permits the multiplication of the small jobs available in them.
More generally although largely independent of them in principle, the internal struggles always depend, in outcome, on the correspondence that they maintain with the external struggles -- whether struggles at the core of the field of power or at the core of the social field as a whole. So the naturalist revolution was made possible by the meeting between, on the one hand, the new disposition that Zola and his friends could introduce into the field of production, and on the other, the objective changes that guarantee the conditions of achievement of these dispositions: to wit, on the one hand, a lowering of the barrier to entry into the literary professions linked to the relatively favourable situation of the market for intellectual work (in the larger sense), offering the jobs necessary to guarantee a minimum of resources to writers depived of private income (like Zola himself, employed by the Librarie Hachette from 1860 to 1865 and contributor to several newspapers), and on the other hand a literary market in expansion, hence more numerous and more socially varied readers, therefore a market that is potentially inclined to welcome new products.
Just as with the success of naturalism, the backlash that militates against it in the 1880s is not to be understood as a direct effect of external changes, whether economic or political. The ‘crisis of naturalism’ correlates with a crisis of the literary market, that is, more precisely the disappearance of the conditions that in the preceding era had favoured the access of new social categories to consumption and in parallel to production. And the political situation (the multiplication of labour exchanges, the development of the CGT trade union and the socialist movement, the Anzin strike, Fourmies, etc.), which is not unconnected to the spiritualist renewal among the bourgeoisie (and the very numerous conversions of writers), can only encourage those at the core of the field who, carried along by the internal logic of the competitive fight, stand up against the naturalists (and through them against the cultural pretensions of the rising fractions of the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie). There is no doubt that the climate of spiritual restoration helps to favour the return to forms of art that, like Symbolist poetry or the psychological novel, carry to the highest degree the reassuring denial of the social world.
[To Be Continued...]
